


How the New World Began

by Tallulah



Category: Death Note
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Gen, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Past Character Death, Post-Canon, Vignette
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-09
Updated: 2015-09-09
Packaged: 2018-04-19 23:05:28
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,803
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4764347
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tallulah/pseuds/Tallulah
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"And then there was no one left to stand in the way of Kira's glorious new world." Two children work on their essays about the birth of the new world.</p>
            </blockquote>





	How the New World Began

**Author's Note:**

> Originally written for dn_contest on LiveJournal, prompt 'mythology'.

The sky hung over the windows and there was so much damp on the glass you couldn't see anything but grey. Youko shivered and tucked her feet more closely under her, making the floorboards creak. When it was cold it made it harder to do your homework. A lot of things made it harder to do your homework. 

Like your best friend (except when you were fighting) sitting opposite you and sighing and chewing her pen and saying stuff every so often and both of you knowing once you'd finished you could do a bunch of more fun things. 

Actually it wasn't really anything to do with that, but Youko wanted it to be.

Across from her, Mizuki sighed again and shifted position, twirling a strand of hair round her ink-spattered finger. "Hey, what are you writing?"

"Dunno yet," Youko said. It was automatic (because Mizuki always copied if you let her) but this time it was true too, even though normally she was quite good at writing essays.

"I suppose we just write what Miyazawa-sensei told us, right? I mean, all that stuff about why Kira came to power and what we should be doing to make Him happy. Right?"

Youko looked over at her properly. She hadn't been looking before, she'd been feeling kind of funny about this whole essay and she hadn't wanted Mizuki to know that. But as she looked this time she saw Mizuki was frowning and drawing spirals down the side of her notebook and that made her feel a bit better. Maybe it _was_ just that the essay was difficult. After all, it hadn't been - "Yeah... I guess."

"Only... we already wrote all that stuff down in class, so why's she want us to write it all again?"

"So she knows we know it, I s'pose."

"Huh." Mizuki stopped twirling at her hair and started running a length of it between her fingers. She was always fiddling with her hair, probably because it was long, much longer than Youko's. Mum wouldn't let Youko grow her hair really long, she said it would be inconvenient.

"Homework's so _dumb_." Mizuki scowled down at her empty page, then, a little faster, said, "C'mon, Youko, tell me what you're gonna write. I won't just copy, I promise. We can, like, work together and then we'll get it done really fast and then Mum'll give us some cake..." 

Youko hesitated. Mizuki _always_ copied and it would be, like, really obvious if they both wrote exactly the same thing. But then, she didn't know what she was going to write either, did she?

_Working together_ sounded better.

"C'mon," Mizuki said, bouncing up and down a little and knocking a few bits of paper off the table, "c'mon. If you help, I'll let you try out that nail varnish I told you about. The blue one with the silver bits. I wasn't going to, 'cause it's really special and it cost _loads_ , but if you help me out -"

It was that which settled it. The thought of blue and silver nail varnish, and being all happy over blue and silver nail varnish, was a good thought, in a way that thinking about this essay wasn't.

"Okay," she said. "Well... uh..." She stared down at the lined paper where, twenty minutes ago, she'd carefully written the questions to be answered, in her best handwriting. _1\. Why did Kira come to this world and what happened when He did? 2. Explain how Kira makes this world better. 3. What are some things you think Kira would like you to do to help Him?_ And then, next to that, her name: _Youko Aizawa - Class 4B_. 

Probably Kira knew if you copied homework. Probably Kira knew exactly what they were doing right now.

"Well, Kira came to this world to... make it better," she said.

"Yeah, but that's in the question. We can't write that."

Youko chewed on her own pen; which she didn't normally do, but the taste of plastic and ink helped. It made her feel like a really little kid again. "If it's in the question, that means it's right. I'm not _just_ putting that. Um... Kira came to this world because there were lots of evil people in it. He came to this world in the body of a human and he saw that it was, you know, all rotten and stuff and we were all evildoers -"

"That's not right," Mizuki said. She was trying to do a little plait in her hair now, she wasn't even _pretending_ to do the work, and she was such a show-off about her hair anyway. "There's good people and evil people and the evil people all die now and us good people stay alive." 

"Okay, you write the stupid thing then!"

"Don't yell at me!" Mizuki snapped. "I'm just saying! Miyazawa-sensei said it, there are good people and evil people, that was the first thing she said, she wrote it up on the board. Don't be so mad just 'cause you weren't listening." She glanced at Youko. Youko didn't know what sort of expression she had on; her mouth felt kind of shaky as if she might cry. (She'd nearly said a curse word instead of _stupid_. That'd be another sin, right?)

"Miyazawa-sensei's so boring," she said, instead of crying. "I keep not listening to her."

"Yeah, but you still manage to get good grades." Mizuki giggled a bit, as if she didn't know what else to do. "Uh... okay... okay, so Kira saw the world was rotten and that there were lots of evil people, how's that?"

"Yeah." Youko took a deeper breath, started drawing a flower on the cover of her own notebook. She was good at drawing flowers. "Yeah, that sounds right."

"Well, then what? C'mon, Youko, normally you say loads of stuff you've thought up on your own. Why are you being so thick?"

"You're thicker," Youko said, again automatically. Mizuki stuck out her tongue. Normally Youko would pull an uglier face back but suddenly she didn't want to, suddenly she just wanted to get the stupid homework done. " _Anyway_ , so then we just write about how Kira came to this world and only wanted to help, but then the infidel L, like, wanted to destroy Kira because - because he was evil and... and..."

"You're being so slow," Mizuki said. "Like you didn't even listen at all. Even I know this bit." She was writing now, tongue sticking out a little. "L called a bunch of, like, bad guys to him and they banded together and vowed to destroy Kira. And then L put Kira... to many tests and called on Him to... say he was... God but Kira wouldn't." She'd smeared ink over the side of her hand now. "Even though L trapped Him in the darkness for fifty-three days, Kira would not give in. And then - Youko, _hello_ , you're s'posed to be writing this too - and then L chained Kira to him and said 'now I will see when you punish evildoers.' But Kira called his friends to him and gave them the power to judge instead, and L didn't see."

"I thought you didn't listen in class," Youko said.

"Duh, I already knew this bit. My mum used to tell it to me when I was little." Mizuki snorted. "So _embarrassing_. But she wanted me to, like, know, and be grateful to Kira and stuff, you know how mums get."

Youko wanted to point out that her mum didn't talk about Kira much, but at the same time she didn't. Mizuki might think that that was weird, too.

"And then Kira called all of his enemies, led by L, to... to... oh, you know, some place... I dunno, Wakaba was talking to me then, I really can't stand the way she keeps sucking up to me, don't you think it's really annoying?"

"Yeah."

"So where was it?" Mizuki put down her pen, stretching her fingers theatrically, and started plaiting her hair again. "The place, I mean? Are we s'posed to know? I can't remember."

"It was a warehouse."

Youko wondered afterwards if she only said it to show off, or because she didn't like looking stupid in front of Mizuki. 

Showing off was definitely a sin. 

"Was it?" Mizuki said. "Was it really? I don't remember anyone saying that."

"I do," Youko said.

"Okay. So they all went to this warehouse and there was, like, one of Kira's disciples looking through the door, right?"

"Yeah. And he knew everyone's names."

"Oh, yeah," Mizuki said. "He knew everyone's names and he looked at them and he saw they were all evil and so Kira granted him power -"

"No," Youko said. "That's not right."

"Yes it is."

"No, it's not! He just... knew all their names. And then. You know. He killed them."

"He judged them," Mizuki said. "He judged them as, like, evildoers and found they were bad and..."

"Just put he killed them, all right?"

"Whatever," Mizuki said, rolling her eyes. "And then there was no one left to stand in the way of Kira's glorious new world. The end. Okay, that's one. So what are you gonna write for question two?"

Youko shrugged, yanked a bit on a strand of her own hair. 

Dad hadn't been home much but once she'd gone to him and asked why wouldn't Mummy let her have long hair like girls on TV? 

He'd told her that at work they'd made him cut his hair short too and sometimes you just had to put up with it. Or maybe that had been another conversation. Youko couldn't really remember. Or maybe she'd made it up. Sometimes it felt like she'd made a lot of things up, about Dad. Like she'd never really had a proper one or something. 

(You weren't allowed to say it, but) it wasn't _fair_.

"You know what?" she said. "How about we don't do any more for now? We could go back to it later."

"My mum said we have to do our homework first," Mizuki said. 

"Yeah, but... we've done most of it." Youko rolled her eyes. "Come _on_ , it's boring. I bet the only person doing all her homework now is Wakaba. She's such a weirdo. Come on, we can just tell your mum we got it done and do the rest... later."

Mizuki still looked like she wasn't sure, and so Youko crawled away from the table and started looking through the other girl's collection of china ornaments. And then Mizuki came over to tell her to stop picking them up in case she broke one, and Youko figured once that had happened there was no way they'd go back to the homework tonight. 

Which probably made her an evildoer for real, but she wasn't really surprised.


End file.
